Ruth is back. My favorite person is home again! Also good: I don't have to wake up at 6 a.m. tomorrow, can extend my runs, and can start to address my open source backlog.

Friday I was bragging about what an awesomely agile and zen dad I am, but today I am deeply toasted from a non-stop day of shuttling, cooking, cleaning, and swatting the worst software bugs. We're deep in the season of extra orchestra and dance rehearsals, school fundraising events, and fiddle and guitar recitals. Tomorrow, my youngest's elementary school is having its annual "Spaghetti Dinner" and Book Fair. It could be fun, but they forgot to check my schedule: we've already got French lesson and swimming lessons happening at the same time and I haven't yet installed the app that Bea's guitar teacher wants me to get for her and there are all these quality reports for work that I can't seem to get to during the day. Thanks for allowing me to vent.

I'm flying solo through next Wednesday while Ruth is visiting her folks in Seattle and attending the Entomological Societies meeting in Vancouver. Open source stuff will slip a bit, sorry about that.

I don't mind being a solo parent for a week or so. This is the 5th week this year. To be honest, I think I'm actually pretty good at it. Today was pretty busy, with two different early runs to school, seeing Bea and some other cool kids pick up certificates at an 9 a.m. award assembly, work, then driving a carload of kids to Loveland Laser Tag for a birthday party that ran until 10 p.m. Non-stop from 6 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.

During a break in the action, I explained test-driven development to my oldest daughter's best friend, a smart 7th grader. I'd brought my computer along to LLT and had been working in a corner. Test-driven development, I explained, was the process of working backwards from a program B, which verifies that a program A works as it should, and this seemed to be from her reaction a bit of a puzzler. "Why don't you just write the program first, since you have to have an idea of it before you can write the test?"

Now I'm enjoying a beer, decompressing, and working on my writing.

I forgot to blog this on the day we released it. I'm sick today and will keep this post brief. Fiona 1.8.0 is on PyPI. The release announcement is here: https://github.com/Toblerity/Fiona/releases/tag/1.8.0. There will be a 1.8.1 release soon.

Last Thursday I traded my MacBook Pro for a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon so I can dig more deeply into the performance of Python, Rasterio, and GDAL on Linux. Because I've never used many Apple-only programs and keep all my work in "the cloud" switching was easy.

My Apple keyboard and mouse mostly work, which is a nice surprise. The ThinkPad's weird 3-button trackpad and red pointer will take some getting used to.

It's retrospective time! Ten years ago, my family, all four of us, went to Europe for the first time. Ruth had meetings in Prague and I had a meeting in London. In between, we did a little touristing in Alsace, scouted Montpellier for future sabbatical housing, and visited friends in England.

I was back here 7 years later presenting on GeoJSON at IETF 93 and wished I had Arabelle along.

I think I might actually from Alsace, because Colmar really felt like home.

Our first home in the neighborhood of Montpellier was a little vacation trailer during the off season in Clapiers. On two sabbaticals we stayed in the city proper, but if we came back, maybe we'd would stay out in the country next time.

Everybody has mixed feelings about Carnon plage, I think. There's no nature, and the development is kinda gross, but the sand and water is nice, and it's super close to the city. Ruth grew up at the beach in Southern California and felt "meh", but Arabelle and I were more like "waouh!"

Good ole Gare de Lyon. We were just there two months ago. This was Arabelle's first TGV ride. We took an RER from here to Gare du Nord and then went under the channel to St. Pancras in London and then on to Swindon. Trains are the best way to travel.

Bath is very touristy but also quite comfy. My people are not really from Alsace, but from Southwestern Britain, and so I felt right at home in Bath.

Arabelle loved England because we have friends and our friends have cats.

I went to London a few times when I was working at ISAW, but this was my first trip and my favorite. We stayed in a hotel on Drury Lane, and despite not seeing the Muffin Man, had a fun time exploring Covent Garden and Neal's Yard.

Fiona 1.8b1 is in the cheese shop today while supplies last: https://pypi.org/project/Fiona/1.8b1/. There are changes since 1.8a3, none of them breaking. Please, if you can, run pip install fiona==1.8b1 to help test this prerelease.

It started snowing at about 9 p.m. last night and this morning we woke up to a 10 cm blanket of snow. Not enough to cause any damage, but plenty enough to play in.

One of the neat weather features on the Front Range of Colorado is the dramatic warm up before a winter storm. A strong trough or closed low (like a hurricane) imports warm air from the south before the system hits. We experienced this today. The weather for Arabelle's 10:30 a.m. soccer game was beautiful: calm, sunny, 15°C.

Arabelle is playing 11 on 11 U14 soccer this fall and plays the holding midfielder role for her team. I and the other parents watched her team win 3-1 under blue skies, knowing that it's going to be much different tonight. We got a little snow Wednesday, but this weekend's storm is more serious.

After the game, I ran one of my favorite foothill trail loops and then came back and got the garden ready for winter. I picked herbs and green tomatos, cut down plants that aren't going to survive a freeze, and tossed them in the compost. I brought our rosemary bush inside, put away our rain barrel, disconnected all the hoses, and folded up and stashed the patio furniture.

Bring it, Winter!

Colaboratory is a free Jupyter notebook environment that requires no setup and runs entirely in the cloud.

I tried it out for the first time today and although I expected Rasterio to install and work – I've tried very hard to make it usable in this kind of application – it was still gratifying to see a little washed out thumbnail of band 1 of Landsat 8's land imager in my Colab notebook.